From mid-April 2014 to 28 February 2015, 5,809 people were documented as killed and 14,740 wounded in the east of Ukraine. Of these, 1,012 were killed and 3,793 wounded between 1 December 2014 and 15 February 2015. Given that full reports on casualties, especially near Donetsk airport and in the Debaltseve area, are still pending, the UN Human Rights Office estimates that the total number of people killed in eastern Ukraine by 2 March has almost certainly exceeded 6,000.

This is just Russian regular army, not counting the separatists and others. The number of killed in this category is estimated in excess of 20 thousand, this number is difficult to compile exactly due to lack of official reporting -- they just bury them in unmarked graves or burn on site in mobile crematoriums.

The team, led by Kerri Cahoy, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, has already used the method to determine the properties of clouds on the exoplanet Kepler-7b. The planet is known as a “hot Jupiter,” as temperatures in its atmosphere hover at around 1,700 kelvins.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft was designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. It was pointed at a fixed patch of space, constantly monitoring the brightness of 145,000 stars. An orbiting exoplanet crossing in front of one of these stars causes a temporary dimming of this brightness, allowing researchers to detect its presence.

Researchers have previously shown that by studying the variations in the amount of light coming from these star systems as a planet transits, or crosses in front or behind them, they can detect the presence of clouds in that planet’s atmosphere. That is because particles within the clouds will scatter different wavelengths of light.

Analysis of data from the Kepler space telescope has shown that roughly half of the dayside of the exoplanet Kepler-7b is covered by a large cloud mass. Statistical comparison of more than 1,000 atmospheric models show that these clouds are most likely made of Enstatite, a common Earth mineral that is in vapor form at the extreme temperature on Kepler-7b. These models varied the altitude, condensation, particle size, and chemical composition of the clouds to find the right reflectivity and color properties to match the observed signal from the exoplanet.

In 2009, 26%, or one in four, of the nation’s bridges were either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. While some progress has been made in recent years to reduce the number of deficient and obsolete bridges in rural areas, the number in urban areas is rising. A $17 billion annual investment is needed to substantially improve current bridge conditions. Currently, only $10.5 billion is spent annually on the construction and maintenance of bridges.

In 2013, one in nine of the nation’s bridges are rated as structurally deficient, while the average age of the nation’s 607,380 bridges is currently 42 years. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) estimates that to eliminate the nation’s bridge deficient backlog by 2028, we would need to invest $20.5 billion annually, while only $12.8 billion is being spent currently. The challenge for federal, state, and local governments is to increase bridge investments by $8 billion annually to address the identified $76 billion in needs for deficient bridges across the United States

John Oliver pointed out on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, infrastructure isn’t “sexy” and maintenance even less so. If Edward Norton and Steve Buscemi are willing to highlight our nation’s infrastructure needs and labor and business can come together on this issue, too, then Congress can also certainly find a way

The T-14 (Object 149) main battle tank is based on the Armata platform, which has been in development at Uralvagonzavod since 2009. Other than the tank, the platform will be used for armored fighting vehicles (AFVs), self-propelled guns (SPGs), engineering vehicles and other uses.

The Armata tank will reportedly feature a remotely controlled gun and fully automated loading, as well as a separate crew compartment made from composite materials and protected by multilayered armor.

The tank will go through state trials in 2016, and it is expected that by 2020, over 2,300 tanks on the Armata platform will be supplied to the military.

The platform’s chief tank (T-14) sports an unmanned remotely controlled turret armed with a brand new 125 mm 2A82-1M smoothbore cannon. Its muzzle energy is greater than one of the world’s previously considered best cannons: the German Leopard-2 Rheinmetall 120 mm gun. The 125 mm gun has 15-20 percent improved accuracy and its rolling fire angular dispersion has improved 1.7 times. According to Russian media, the Armata tank might also come with a specially developed 152 mm gun, the most powerful ever cannon to be mounted on a main battle tank.

Google Loon has had tests with major cellular carriers. The internet balloons have provided high-speed connections to people in isolated parts of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Mike Cassidy, Project Loon’s leader, says the technology is now sufficiently cheap and reliable for Google to start planning how to roll it out. By the end of 2015, he wants to have enough balloons in the air to test nearly continuous service in several parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Commercial deployment would follow: Google expects cellular providers to rent access to the balloons to expand their networks. Then the number of people in the world who still lack Internet access should start to shrink, fast.

The 15-kilogram box carried by a Loon balloon has computers that act on commands from flight engineers, as well as equipment to transmit Internet connectivity to the ground below.

The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy. The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model. We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method.

Ever since the Europa mission had been given the official nod of approval by NASA, scientists have been giddy with excitement at the prospect of exploring a new world where life might reside. The likely model for the mission is the Europa Clipper, which will orbit Jupiter and fly by the moon multiple times. According to a Tuesday story in the New Scientist, researchers are mulling over how to use the Europa Clipper to search for life.

Ordinarily, detecting life on Europa using a remote sensing satellite would be problematic at best. Whatever life that might exist on Europa would reside in the subsurface ocean, deep beneath the ice crust, warmed by the tidal forces exerted by Jupiter. Accessing that ocean would require a lander with a drill that would penetrate the ice crust.

However, in 2013, data gathered by the Hubble space telescope suggested that geysers of water from the interior ocean were escaping through vents in the ice crust.

While attention has been focused on a multi-billion dollar mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, NASA is planning a number of new planetary missions. Most are grouped under the Discovery Program, small-scale missions with a cap of $450 million, and the New Frontier Program, which has a cap of $1 billion, according to a Tuesday story in Spaceflight Now.

Hyperloop as envisioned by Elon Musk was to develop a high speed, intercity transporter using a low pressure tube train which would reach a top speed of 800 miles per hour (1,300 km/h) with a yearly capacity of 15 million passengers

The chairless chair eases many assembly activities. This high-tech carbon-fiber construction allows Audi employees to sit without a chair. At the same time, it improves their posture and reduces the strain on their legs.